


season of the haythor

by meritmut



Series: your skin suits you best [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (Rey: why not both?), Blood Drinking, Blood and Injury, Canon Compliant, F/M, Folklore, Horror, Jakku, Minor Character Death, Monsters, Vampire Kylo Ren, Vampires, bite the things you love, tfw you can't tell if u want to kiss someone or eat them, vampire rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-06-27 14:16:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15687072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: There is a creature, which goes by darkness and scavenges up the carrion from the day gone. It drains beasts of their blood, scours the desert of her dead, and leaves not even bones to know them by.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> for my belovedest bestest person on a day we aren't talking about, i love you and i'm _sorry_

Her body was limp under his touch when he went to grasp her by the arms. She tried to fight him; he could feel the way her muscles tensed in resistance, but she was too weak to put up more than a token struggle and with little effort Kylo was able to get his hand beneath her cheek and tilt her head towards him.

Rey hissed when the light hit her face, jerking her chin out of his grip and hunching over herself to hide behind her cloak, but it was too late—Kylo had already glimpsed the nightmarish transformation that had overtaken her, and he could not keep the horror from his voice when he spoke.

_“Rey, what—”_

Her face was leeched of colour, her golden complexion turned to a cadaverous pallor that made the redness of her sclerae seem all the more violent under her swollen eyelids. Beads of sweat gathered at her hairline; the skin around her bloodless lips was cracked and puffy. She looked half-dead.

She looked like a monster.

She whimpered when he tried to move her, a piteous, wounded-animal sound that tore at him like the dead men’s blades had only moments ago.

She was barely conscious and fading fast. Breathing shallowly, she drew her body inwards and curled her hands into clawed fists against her chest, making herself as small as she could under his alarmed gaze.

Kylo had come to this remote station to find her, to apprehend her and kill her if she left him no choice. He had cut his way through the bounty hunters who’d _also_ been on her tail, thanks to the emperor’s ransom placed on her head by an overzealous general, a man Kylo would much rather see dead. He had been wounded too, getting to her, but it hadn’t mattered. She was there, finally, before him, though she cowered and hid herself away like she was afraid.

That wasn’t right. She had never been afraid

Now was his chance, if he could only take it.

 _End this,_ Hux’s voice in his memory, cold as the void of space itself. _You failed to turn her. This has gone on long enough. Kill her._

Kylo had told himself that he would. That he _could._

 _Could you, though?_ It wasn’t quite her voice in his head that taunted him, but it held the same measured scorn. _Would you have killed her? You never could before._

He hadn’t foreseen her being so frail she could barely move her arms to fight him. He should, probably, have foreseen the effect it would have on him.

How long had she been here? Who left her? _Why?_

Fully aware that he was taking his life into his hands, Kylo girded himself to face Rey’s fury and pressed his way into her mind.

And oh—stars—she _hurt—_

The hunger tore through him like a chasm, a gulf that ripped open inside him and left him reeling. She was  _ starving,  _ her mind and body crying out for something to fill the abyss scouring at her insides.

He pushed further, gritting his teeth when she let out a heartrending whine and clutched at his wrist to push him away. Her nails pricked into his skin but Kylo ignored it, consumed by the need to  _ know— _

He couldn’t see who had left her here. He saw only the scarlet haze of thirst clouding her vision, heard only the hoarse rattle of air in her lungs, the sluggish thump of her ravenous, desiccated heart.

He saw her memories: memories of how she had controlled what she was, how it had never afflicted her like this until she awoke to the Force inside her.

How she feared it was  _ killing  _ her, and wondered if that was what the Force intended all along. 

The station hung in low orbit, just far enough within the atmosphere to see the dawn that crept over the world’s edge. Rey shrank from the encroaching daylight.

_ Please,  _ her voice rasped against his mind.  _ Please, Ben. _

“What?” Kylo shuffled closer, seized with a sudden dread. She wasn’t dying. She couldn’t be—

“Light,” she whispered.

“What?”

_ “The light.” _

His head was muddled, it took him far too long to comprehend but when he did Kylo didn’t hesitate. Lurching forward, he used his body to shelter her from the daylight spilling in through the viewport, draping his cloak— _ finally, a use for the thing _ —over Rey and casting her in a shadow that still seemed too bright for her desperate, dilating pupils. She let him fold himself in around the shape of her, fitting his knees and arms into her until she was covered and he could feel the flutter of the pulse in her throat under his chin. She was not a small woman, but she felt tiny in his arms, brittle and fragile and too close to breaking.

Her hunger was all-consuming, and finally Kylo understood.

Without hesitating he tore off his glove and brought his bare wrist up to her mouth.

“Rey,” he breathed, nudging her pointedly. “Take me.”

Her bloodshot eyes flew open. She twisted round to stare at him, her gaze filled with fear.

_ “What?” _

Her nostrils flared as she scented his skin so close to her. Her hands rose and tried to pry him away again but for once his strength was an advantage—and Kylo took it.

“Do it,” he hissed, grappling to pin her hands as he pressed his pulse point against her lower lip. “Rey, please—”

“No,” she ground out, _ “no.” _

_ “Rey.” _

_ “No.” _

With a snarl of frustration he tore his arm away from her and tugged his sleeve further down, searching for the place on his forearm where the mercenary’s vibroblade had scored his flesh. It still bled, hot and red and—he knew—what she needed.

_ I can’t,  _ her voice moved over his mind again,  _ please don’t make me. _

“You’ll die,” he snapped back at her, guiding his arm up to her mouth once more. She stiffened when she smelled the blood. “I want you to,” he told her, scarcely knowing what he was asking her other than that he  _ meant it,  _ every word. “Let me help you.”

“Ben…” Her voice was so weak but she was already pawing at his arm, her tongue flicking out to taste him.

“It’s alright,” he mumbled, shuffling her into the cradle of his spread legs so he could support her body with his own massive breadth. She settled there like she was made for it. “Have me.”

Her lips moved over his skin tentatively. Her fingers tightened around his arm.

_ Are you sure?  _ Rey asked one last time.

_ Of course not, _ Kylo nearly bit back. He was sure of nothing other than he could not let her die.

“Yes,” he whispered instead. He wrapped his free arm around her middle. “Have me, Rey. Take me.”

He felt the moment she surrendered. She groaned, her body sagging against his, and then Kylo felt the sharp tearing pain as her teeth sank into his arm and she began to lap and suck like a feral animal at the wound. It hurt, a bit, but it was nothing: it was her pain, the pain she demanded from him, the tithe he gladly paid. He heard her sigh and swallow and he thought perhaps she moaned a little too, but that way lay danger so he focussed instead on the faint discomfort as she drew his blood, pulling it from him with the insistent suction of her lips.

There was danger there too, but so long as he held the pain at the forefront it didn’t matter.

Her mouth was so warm, so soft and it grew warmer the longer she drank from him. The press of her tongue against the wound grew more demanding and her body felt suddenly more _alive_ against his.

_ Ben… _ her voice slipped into his head. She sounded intoxicated. Kylo buried his face in the curve of her neck and groaned.

_ “Rey,”  _ he choked out, immediately regretting it because the exhalation forced him to breathe in and all he could smell, all he could taste was  _ her. _

She writhed in his arms a bit, gripping his arm more firmly. Blood bubbled over around her lips: he could feel where it smeared across her cheeks and turned her skin slick and slippery with gore.  Kylo let her drink her fill, dimly aware that the fog he had felt in her mind was beginning to seep over the bond into his own and dull his senses. The pain in his arm was lessening, the ache of other wounds on his body growing fainter until his awareness of his own extremities was—muted, somehow, as if he was floating somewhere above himself, barely connected to the flesh and bone of his body.

He could drift like this forever, anchored to reality by nothing more than the pressure of her lips and teeth and tongue, the weight of her warm, lean frame against his, her presence in the Force growing calmer and smoother as her hunger abated.

“Rey…” he mumbled, his forehead slipping to her shoulder. She hummed, her Force signature lapping soothingly at his, her fingers caressing lightly the place where she gulped his life down, the both of them trying to pretend they couldn't feel when her ravening teeth took a little more than blood. She moved over him like the soft, dark waves of the deepest sea; she was eternal and endless and soothing and Kylo could do nothing but drown in her.

She could consume him, like this. She could swallow him whole and he would want for nothing more. Rey moaned into his wound again and Kylo shifted back a little, fervently hoping she couldn't feel how much he  _wanted_. She seemed oblivious, lost in feeding, taking as much of him down as she could.

Maybe she would stop, before she killed him.

Then again.

Maybe she wouldn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

“I’m cursed,” Rey said flatly. She spoke without feeling, as if it were a simple fact and not one of the most unexpected things that could've come out of her mouth. Kylo looked up from her feet, where he’d been studiously staring ever since he drew his arm away from her lips (eliciting a truly pathetic whine from the girl) and reality had come crashing back.

He had _given_ her his _blood_.

“You believe that?”

She shrugged. “I know it. What I am—it’s monstrous.” She turned her face from him then, like maybe she thought she had revealed too much.

“Maybe,” Kylo agreed, though he didn’t. “But not the kind you can help.”

Her head jerked up. Her eyes were wide, and he knew where her mind had gone.

_You’re a monster._

_Yes, I am._

“I can,” she whispered bleakly, “I have to.”

“Says who? Skywalker?” He couldn’t keep the scorn from his voice—he didn’t even try. “Did he tell you that you should be better than this? That you should be _less_ than this? Did he tell you that what you were was an abomination?”

Rey had grown paler and paler the fiercer his voice had become, and Kylo couldn’t tell if it was with shock or with rage.

“What _he_ was,” he continued, more quietly now. “What _we_ _are.”_

She blinked. She didn’t want to understand him: he could see that. Her jaw had gone all tense and her brow furrowed like his words confused her but she was _so_ clever, and sharp, and he had never lied to her yet.

(Well. He’d never _meant_ to, but sometimes his thoughts got lost on the way to his mouth and _sometimes_ his mouth had different ideas altogether. There would be a time to beg her forgiveness for that, but perhaps when he wasn’t bleeding from an open wound in her vicinity.)

Eventually, Rey drew in a deep breath and turned her feline eyes on him again.

“There’s a story,” she said, “in the Goazon. About the—creatures—that hunt the Graveyard after nightfall. I always thought it was just to scare people out of scavenging after dark, and explain why there were never as many bodies as there should’ve been. Things die every day in the Badlands, y’know? It's just...how it is. But if they don’t get you buried before dusk, come morning there isn’t anything left to bury.” She swallowed thickly, lifted a hand to her mouth and scrubbed at the blood staining her cheeks. “But then I began to feel—different. Wrong. The sun made my skin itch, so I covered it up. Anything I ate would taste like ash, but I thought...” she grimaced, “I thought it was just that the rations got worse. But then…I would _smell_ things. Fresh carrion, roasting in the sun. Living bodies and dead ones. Their smell—it would make my teeth hurt.” She closed her eyes, as if she could keep the truth out. “It made me—”

“Hungry,” Kylo finished softly.

 _“Starving,”_ her voice was hoarse. “Like there was an abyss inside me and nothing could fill it. It terrified me. The Teedos said my mother must’ve been a ripper-raptor, the way I could sniff out death. The way even the rotten stuff didn’t turn my stomach when there was nothing else to eat. But I never—” she released a shaky breath—“I never felt like this. Not till the forest. Not till you.”

He could still taste the remnant of his own blood in the back of his throat, iron-sharp and syrupy sweet. It was her, inside him, everything she saw and heard and tasted refracted through the bond, her mind the light and her hunger the thing that broke it and him no more than an echo of her need—all he was, bent to her the way he had been since the day they met. His thoughts swam: lightheaded, Kylo dragged his tongue over the mess she’d made of his forearm so that she could see, through the blood, the way his teeth grew thick and sharp like hers. The way his pupils dilated, and his shoulders hunched, and something of the beast crept over his face.

“It’s alright,” he told her slowly. “I feel it too.”

She had drunk too much. A thick, reddish fog began to gather on the edges of Kylo's vision, the world clouding over until all he could see was her. She was beautiful, like this: full red mouth, flushed with feeding, her tongue probing at the inside of her gums to catch the last drops of his blood and gulp them down.

She had had too much of him, but Kylo couldn’t find it in himself to resent it—and as consciousness faded, he found himself regretting that he’d stopped her.

“Ben?” Her voice filled his head, but he was already gone.

 

**

 

He awoke to find her lapping at his arm again, her gaze trained on his face as though to gauge his reaction to her boldness. Her eyes glinted redly in the station’s artificial light, but the irritation in her sclerae and the inflamed pink around her lips had receded a little since he passed out.

She drew back when he sat up, licking her lips up at him from her crouched position. She seemed more herself, now: whatever shame or scruple had assailed her earlier was gone. She looked _defiant_.

“How do you feel?” Kylo mumbled, dragging his hand through his hair and remembering too late the runnels of sticky blood trailing from his forearm to his fingers. He grimaced, rubbing the gore off on his thigh.

“Better,” Rey answered, not without caution. “Why did you do that?”

“Why did you let yourself get that bad?” Kylo returned. _Deflected?_

“I didn’t—it wasn’t meant to happen.” She was _embarrassed_ now. “I haven’t been able to make planetfall in weeks. Every hunter in the Rim knows my face…wants me dead.” She looked momentarily crestfallen, like the idea that complete strangers were out for her blood was— _hurtful,_ to her. She tried to keep it from her face but he saw. He always saw. “Your bounty’s made sure I’m not safe anywhere.”

Better strangers than relatives, he reflected gloomily. “It’s not mine.”

Rey had figured as much—it wasn’t his style. He would seek her out himself, hunt her down and kill her with his bare hands if he wanted her dead. She had witnessed his savagery with her own eyes. Still…

“You’re the Supreme Leader,” she retorted. “It’s all you. Wasn’t that the point?”

 _Yes. No. I don’t—_ “This was not me. I was aware of it, but I believed you could handle the threat. Plainly, I was mistaken.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

Kylo snorted. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“What?”

He gestured over his shoulder, toward the aft shuttle bay—the one he’d blown half to kingdom come on his arrival, thinking it a quicker way of blocking the mercenaries’ exit if any of them happened to escape him on the ground.

He’d done that, alright, and done it so well he’d managed to trap himself here too.

“Huh,” Rey said, when he told her as much. “That was smart.”

Kylo gave her a _look,_ because depriving herself of nourishment to the point that she couldn’t lift a finger in self-defence was hardly a smart move and she knew it as well as he did.

He looked down at his arm, and the ragged slice she’d been chewing on while he was unconscious. A strange feeling came over him as he regarded it. She was stronger now: her eyes were brighter and she looked less like a walking corpse. He hadn’t spotted her ship in the aft hangar so presumably it was elsewhere: safe. She could’ve left, if she had wanted. Instead she had stayed, and sat over him like the strangest kind of guard dog, licking his wounds while she waited for him to wake.

He pushed the feeling aside. Sentimental nonsense. She had stayed because she was hungry, still, and because this defunct station in the middle of nowhere was as close to safety as she could get.

“Are you done?” he asked, gesturing to the wound.

Rey nodded. “I was trying to close it up,” she said, ducking her head almost shyly. “I’m not good at—at healing. I don’t really know how.”

Kylo stared at her. “You—tried to heal me,” he echoed dumbly.

Looking down at his arm again, he saw that it was true. The edges were a little less angry than they had been; she hadn’t been drinking from him. She had been trying to _mend_ him.

“I…” Her health was clearly much improved, for she _blushed._ “Yeah. A bit.”

“Why?”

Rey frowned, and gave a careless little shrug. “You helped me. You— _fed_ me.” She thumbed at the corner of her mouth, rubbed away a smear of brownish blood and sucked it between her lips. His blood, Kylo thought. The blood she had been drinking. The blood that was inside her, now, flooding her veins and warming her body.

The thought made him go all warm inside.

 _Force,_ he hoped she couldn’t hear what he was thinking.

Kylo cleared his throat.

Come with me, he wanted to say. Stay, and you'll never go hungry again. The way she was looking at him now, he thought maybe she could read it on his face.

So he scowled and jerked his sleeve down over the wound. "You were reckless," he said curtly. "You made yourself vulnerable."

Her face went blank, before the familiar dark fire returned.

"Fuck you."

"You said that."

"I meant it."

The surly tone in Rey's voice made him nearly crack a smile. He leant forward, reaching out until he could press his thumb to her upper lip and get at the last smudge of blood. She let him do it, her wide eyes holding his all the while, and when he left his hand hovering in front of her it only took a second for her to comprehend the gesture.

Her tongue flicked out, chasing the blood he offered as apology and reconciliation and promise, all.

The corner of her lips twitched upward in what might have been a smile.

"Fuck you," she muttered again, but this time her eyes were warm. Still, Kylo rolled his eyes.

"I know."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reminder CW for blood, injury, and some potentially-distressing murdering towards the end

There is a creature, in the wild.

They tell tales of it, in the camps and the tunnels and the clustered hovels which are all the living may claim for themselves on this barren planet. They say that it is humanoid in appearance, or sometimes that it hails from a race of monsters; that at first glance it is indistinguishable from a young child or that the mere sight of it is enough to instil a terror like madness.

The stories conflict themselves, as legends often do. Some speak of creatures as slight and fey as a wisp, a mirage conjured from the play of dust and light over the sands; others of beasts with yellow eyes and many teeth, which under cover of night with clawlike hands pry their way under tent-flaps and doorways or tear open graves to feast upon the sleepers within.

On one thing the stories agree: that it hungers, endlessly, for the flesh of the living and the dead; that nothing can sate it, and nothing made by mortal hands can kill it.

 

**

 

There are more ghosts in the desert than there are living things. We give them names so we are not afraid of them.

This is how we came by R’iia, whose breath is the storm, who is called Umat by the Uthuthma of the plains: Umat the scourge, vengeance of the airs, the great carrion bird whose colossal wings stir up the sands into squalls as high as mountains. This is why we have Khepry, the scarab who eats the dead, who at the end of each day sheds his carapace and casts it over the face of the sun then burrows down under the earth to summon it again from the belly of Haraket the horizon. This is why we made the gods, why we conjured them out of the wind and starlight and named them with our tongues: because if they walk beside us then we do not walk alone.

Anything to fill the silence.

The girl was never much of a believer. Too much storytelling can go to your head, after a while—you spend long enough spinning fairytales out of nothing, you give enough of your faith to fantasies, and soon enough you begin to forget what is real.

Though, maybe this is what you hope for: for forgetting. Given the option, not many here would choose to remember.

People forget less easily than the desert. In other places maybe this is not so: years from now, the girl will wander under the green woods of another world and feel the weight of memory all around her; the memory of trees, ancient and immortal, unchanging but _alive_ in a way that nothing on her homeworld is. The landscape of the desert is never the same one day to the next: this is immortality of another kind, and it will drive you mad if you let it.

Out in the Badlands, when the sands roll in across the world and the howling winds reshape the entire horizon in a matter of hours, memory is the only thing that remains of the way things were, as the days bleed into months into years into decades until you are more ghost than girl, no longer a living thing but only the memory of something that once breathed; until you are not Rey of Jakku but something that has been waiting for a very, very long time.

Out among the scattered inhabitants of the wasteland, the far side of faith is madness.

But this is not a fairytale: there is a creature, which goes by darkness and scavenges up the carrion from the day gone. It drains beasts of their blood, scours the desert of her dead, and leaves not even bones to know them by.

 

**

 

The girl got her first taste of blood when she was twelve years old, and as accustomed to the low ache of hunger in her belly as she was to the shift of sand beneath her feet.

One morning, that hunger drove her out into the desert before dawn was even a grey smudge on the horizon. Her linens offered little protection from the lingering chill but it was preferable to working through the heat of the day, and soon she was speeding out past the across the sands, past the fallen forms of vast half-sunken ships looming up out of the dark like mountains against the star-scattered vault of fading night.

Instinct warned her not to venture too far, but a scavenger’s pragmatism won out: she had begun the day early, and she knew there were richer pickings further out beyond the Graveyard. Half-dazed with thirst, hunger gnawing at her insides and making her vision swim as the first faint greenish tinge of the rising sun smeared across the sky, she pushed on.

Halfway between the _Inflictor_ and the salt-flats south of Kelvin Ridge she came across the hollow bones of an old transport, and inside, a young Teedo lying in a pit formed by the collapsed hull.

They were dead, or dying, which was mostly the same thing out here. There wasn’t a lot of room for shades of grey beneath the bone-white sun: one was dead or one wasn’t—though _not dead_ should never be mistaken for _living._

The Teedo drifted on the edge of consciousness. A mercy, thought the girl: they must have been there all night. Blood stained the deck around them, trickling sluggishly from more wounds than Rey could count from this distance: at a glance it had seemed as though the hull had simply given way under too much weight but she saw now that the fuselage was lined with long spikes, and that the Teedo had been impaled in many places. Any one of them would have been mortal even if no one had ever found them.

It was a cruel way to die.

Rivulets of brownish ichor pooled against the bulkhead below, and the scent of it lodged in the girl’s throat like a shard of bone.

Teedo had keen senses. This one had spent an agonised night in fear of the predators that might come prowling, drawn by the scent of blood: their groans took on a panicked note as the stranger lowered herself down into the pit, wary of the stakes that were meant to ensure whichever luckless creature fell into this trap never climbed out again.

Terror entered the Teedo’s eyes when she drew close. They didn’t know her, yet, for what she was, but something—whether instinct or the strange collective memory that their kind possessed—taught them to fear.

When the girl simply crouched there, making no move to lend them aid, the Teedo began to beg.

They were young; too young to be out alone. Teedo were a social people—where was this one’s family?

Were they left, too?

The girl set her staff aside and inched closer to the dying Teedo’s side. Between the linens that protected her face, her dark eyes took in every wound, every place the creature was torn open. Slowly, cautiously, she reached out a hand toward their pinioned leg.

Too late, the Teedo realised what she meant to do. Their high, shrill cry went unheeded as the girl pressed two fingers against the spike and _pushed_ —they thrashed helplessly and bleated when she did it again, but they were truly trapped, and could do little more than wail through the mess of bloody spittle choking their airways.

The creature _shushed_ softly, clicking her tongue as you might to soothe a startled happabore. There was no malevolence in her eyes—she seemed almost curious, as though she had never seen a creature on the edge of death before, but that was impossible. You couldn’t call the Goazon home without coming to know death intimately. Wherever you went, it was never far away. It lingered at every door, whispered under every window. Death was a shadow that even the black of night could not dispel.

Death wore a young girl’s face and watched the Teedo with bright, pretty green-flecked eyes: death fumbled in her pack to find her knife again and wet her lips with a dark red tongue as she crept towards the terrified creature.

Death murmured _hush now, I’ll make it quick, it’ll be easier if you don’t fight,_ cradling the Teedo’s head in one gentle hand as the other drew her blade across their throat.

 

**

 

There is a creature, out in the wild.

It longs for blood, and carries an undying appetite for the living: because it is dead, the stories say, and searches always for its stolen life. Some say the creature does not _know_ that it is dead, just that it hungers, and it can only be vanquished if you show it its reflection and prove to it the truth. Until then it will go on believing itself alive, draining blood and feasting on flesh in the hopes of restoring warmth to its skin and life to its desiccated heart.

This is how you defeat the monster, the stories say: you show it its true nature; you speak its true name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~let Rey eat~~


	4. Chapter 4

The days were short on this world—or afloat several miles above it. The local star kept its satellites on a tight leash and its circadian cycle seemed almost to chase its orbit, dawn and dusk forever nipping at each other’s heels so that by the time Rey had dragged the last of the dead into the airlock, sealing them away behind walls of hermetic durasteel, the sun had almost completed its arc across the sky.

Dustmotes danced in the air as she made her way back toward the flight deck, skirting the fading light that slanted low across the station’s walls. There was nothing but blue on the other side of the viewports in this quarter; the waning sun gave a burnished tint to everything, airborne particles flashing and sparking like gold.

Rey hesitated at the junction where three corridors met. The station was a sprawling labyrinth tacked together over decades from mismatched modules, and after two days Rey was still gathering her bearings. She knew, though, that if she turned right her path would eventually lead her to the fore hangar, where her ship was safely docked, and if she turned left it would take her back to him.

She hadn’t strayed far in those days. She’d been too afraid to leave the bridge in case she missed a response to her mayday, or the proximity alert if her pursuers found her—not that she had been able to do much when they did. She had taken one of them down as he came at her, got her thumbs in his eyes and shoved his head into the floor until he stopped twitching and went quiet, but by then the noise had drawn the others and the fight had sapped the last of her strength; she reached for the Force but the more she reached the more it slipped from her grasp and she was so _tired,_ weakened by hunger, cornered by strangers who wanted her dead, her vision bleeding scarlet with a futile, pathetic rage, she was out of options and she knew it.

Maybe she could have clawed her way out of it, but right now it felt like she was only alive because Ben Solo—for whatever reason—wanted her to be.

She looked down at her hands. His blood was on them still: the blood he had offered her freely. If anything could bind them more than they already were, surely it would be that; her mouth on him, his _essence_ running hot and red and vital inside her.

She would tell herself, later, that this was why she turned left.

 

**

 

Rey had not spoken before leaving on her self-appointed undertaking, but the defiant look on her face as Kylo watched her pile up the bodies said enough. Since her return to the flight deck she had been curled on the ledge below the enormous viewport, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped close about them.

Far below, the curve of the pale orange gas world took up half the sky, its surface swirling with storms a thousand miles across.

Kylo lowered himself to sit across from her, resting his elbows on his bent knees.

Twilight became her, he thought. Sunset’s auburn glow wove threads of copper and bronze into her hair, flushing her skin and her lips with rose. Her freckles stood out like inverse constellations across her cheeks.

She was so beautiful his chest hurt.

“What is this place?” he asked, mostly to distract himself from the very recent memory of those lips stained and slick with his blood. “A mining station?”

Rey hummed. “This system’s full of ore-rich asteroids, but this is the only atmosphere stable enough to hold a permanent station. It must have been abandoned ages ago, though.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “They didn’t leave a note.”

Something about that filled him with foreboding. There was clearly nothing wrong with the life support systems on board, so what—or who—had driven the station’s previous inhabitants away?

“What made you come here?”

“I knew I was being followed.” Her gaze met the viewport and grew distant. “I was running on sublights for the last days, and I had this sector in my charts. I didn’t know if anyone would answer the distress call.” She grimaced. “Thought I was going to have to sit tight until I ran out of fuel and just hope it wasn’t some bounty hunter who found me. And then—there it was. This place. Out of nowhere, like it had been waiting for me to find it.”

Leaning sideways, she let her temple come to rest against the glass. Her eyes fluttered half-closed.

“When was that?”

“Couple of days, best I could tell. The solar cycle is so short here, I think the days would start to blur together before too long. It was lucky you showed up when you did.”

 _Lucky._ Kylo did not think it was luck that had brought him to her side. It had been pure instinct he had followed to get here, the wordless tug of the Force that guided him as surely as if Rey herself led him by the hand. She had every killer for hire and First Order-payrolled mercenary in the Outer Rim looking for her and none of them had managed to corner her till Kylo was there to even the odds—that was more than _luck._

“What’re you thinking?” Rey was watching him again. The red-gold light in her eyes made him think of flames, embers guttering in the hearth: it recalled to him that night beside the fire, her voice and her heart and her gentle hands burning him down to the bone.

“I think I was…called…to you,” he confessed. “It felt like I was drawn here.”

She held his gaze for a handful of seconds, solemn, and nodded. “I felt like that, once. Is it the Force?”

“Maybe.”

Kylo took the chance when she turned away to study her more closely; to commit to memory the shape of her nose, the scattering of freckles and the delicate shadow of her lashes fanned out across her cheekbones; her lips still faintly swollen and her jaw firm with a stubbornness that never seemed to leave her, the slope of her throat curving down under a shirt stained brown with blood.

Her skin was still flaked with rust-coloured blood in places, and the wild, irrational urge seized him to lean forward and start licking her clean.

That made him think of _her_ tongue, lapping at his wound to try and heal it after she fed, and again the exhilaration knocked the air from his lungs as Kylo remembered everything that had happened in the past few hours.

He must have made some kind of noise, because Rey’s eyes flew up to meet his and widened when she saw him staring.

“What’re you looking at?” She pulled her legs in closer to her chest, resting her chin on her knees so she could glower up at him. Her features were full of wary defiance; her suspicion was a discordant note in the bond but her uncertainty was plain on her face—she was embarrassed, Kylo realised, by his attention. She didn’t know how to respond to being _looked at._

“You,” he replied softly. Her eyes grew even wider, her lips parted slightly but no sound came out: his honesty had startled her.

Strange. He had never lied to her before.

“Why?”

_Why do you breathe?_

“Because I want to,” Kylo admitted, because he had killed for her and fed her his own blood and in the face of that reality there didn’t seem much point in playing coy anymore.

She considered him for a long moment. Her fingers drummed against her shins in a nervous tic.

“Are you here to kill me?”

He blinked at the sudden change of subject. “What?”

“Is that why you came?” Rey pressed. “Why you followed that...call?”

She wanted to believe it, he realised. Or rather—she _wanted_ to want it.

“You know I’m not.”

He knew he had convinced her when she gave a slight nod. “Yeah. And—thank you.”

Kylo scowled. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” Rey skewered him with a look, one imperious eyebrow arched, and oh—she may have sprung from the gutters, this thing, but in that moment he thought her nothing short of queenly. “I thought you’d enjoy hearing me admit to needing you. Thought that was what you wanted.”

“What?”

Her expression turned amused. _“‘You need a teacher’?_ You needed me to know that, Ben. You risked your life so I would hear it.”

Did he? “Did I?”

“Don’t think I don’t know you could’ve killed me if you wanted.” She resettled her weight on the sill, huffing a short laugh. “I thought you were just being—I don’t know, a _man.”_

Whatever face Kylo made in response to that, it was enough to make her roll her eyes.

“When I was a girl there were always ones who would try to convince me that I needed their help. That they could _take care of me,_ if I would only let them. Like there was some secret to staying alive that only they knew, but they’d share it if I played nice.” Her nose wrinkled, her lip curled in contempt. “I didn’t need them.”

Her meaning could not have been clearer.

_I don’t need you._

Kylo looked down at the wound on his arm, which had yet to be dressed or even cleaned beyond Rey’s earlier ministrations. It would heal quickly enough, but his neglect had probably already allowed the flesh and cloth to fuse. It stung when he prodded it; still, it was less raw than the past of which she spoke so bitterly.

Rather than pick at scabs, he said, “I’m glad there was some capacity in which I could be of use.”

She called him an arse, for that. Or at least, that was what he assumed she meant by the guttural noise she made—which wasn’t a language he knew, but enough could be inferred from her intonation to guess at an insult, and growing up in Leia Organa’s household had assured him a wide and colourful vocabulary.

“You did need a teacher,” he pointed out, because no matter his protestations to the contrary Ben Solo took after both of his parents in never knowing quite when to _stop._

To his surprise, Rey neither bared her teeth nor spat another curse at him.

“I know,” she said, and she looked in that moment more vulnerable than she had when he’d found her, fighting for her life and surrounded by death. “I knew when I felt the weight of this... _thing_ inside me. It was too much. Too—big, for me to face alone. I needed someone to teach me how. And I didn’t want it to be you.”

It was Kylo’s turn to be startled by her frankness. “Was Skywalker all that you hoped he would be?”

She scowled. “You’re joking?”

“You spoke so proudly of finding him, I assumed—”

“You know what he was,” she interrupted, so quietly and resignedly that Kylo felt a new fire kindle in the ashes of that old wound. “You—you know.”

Guilt, dull and sickly, filled his belly. He quashed it down and turned away from her.

“Forgive me,” he murmured, half-hoping she wouldn’t hear it.

Rey blinked up at him. “I didn’t have you pegged for the apologetic type.”

She wasn’t wrong. Still—

“You’re right. I do know how he could be. I’m sorry that you had to learn.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Rey.”

“What?”

“Will you always presume to know my mind better than I do?”

Her eyes went big at that, but whatever contrarian thing she thought to say died on her lips and she simply swallowed and shrugged again. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I’m not sure I know mine.”

A strange, pensive silence fell over them. Rey clasped her hands around her knees and leant back until her shoulders met the wall, where she sighed so heavily she seemed to deflate. Her eyes drifted closed again: she looked sleepy, content to just sit with this unfamiliar quiet between them, so he let himself relax against the viewport, opening himself to the drowsy waves emanating from the bond.

“Anyway,” she spoke after a while, and Kylo lifted his head to see mischief dancing in her half-lidded eyes. “You’re one to talk. You’ve been telling me what’s in my head from the moment we met.”

He couldn’t help it—he snorted, only it turned into a full-blown smile that he couldn’t hope to hide and Rey was smiling back, and just like that they were snickering like a pair of children sharing a joke, him dishevelled from battle and her _covered_ in gore and somehow it always seemed to end up like this, the blood and the ozone-reek of combat, the two of them left standing and the stars coming down around them and, Force, Kylo couldn’t find it in himself to mind a bit.


End file.
